You Were Wrong About Him
by Sara Dobie Bauer
Summary: An aging John Watson looks back on how he fell in love with his husband—and how it was all due to a nightmare. Well, a nightmare and handcuffs.


You thought my husband was cruel. He said horrible things to you—biting, personal things. He brought out your worst and made you monstrous. You hated him for it, and for his brilliance, his need for blood and murder and work (always the work) with no pay because he didn't need the money.

You hated him for that, too, his bottomless bank account and the way he wore expensive clothes and that coat. The damn coat. The way he walked with purpose, or rather _strutted_. You hated my husband because you didn't know him, not at all. No one did. But me.

I didn't always. I once called him a machine, before he died and came back, before my divorce from Mary and before Moriarty almost took him away a second time.

That was when it began, when Sherlock Holmes began to show himself to me, and he didn't mean to. It was all an accident, the way we really got to know each other—the way I got to know myself.

I was beginning to feel my age by then. My war injuries ached when the weather was bad and the weather was often bad in London. I carried lines around my eyes that hadn't been there when we first met, not when I first set eyes on him in the St. Bart's laboratory and had no idea my life was about to change forever.

Or maybe I did. How could I not? I was drawn to him as soon as he spoke. Magnetized. I trusted him, God knew why. I killed for him, to protect him. I only realized later that was what we did for each other, always: we protected each other.

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

The jokes about us being a couple stopped when I turned fifty and Sherlock, damn him, still looked twenty-five. On the night I began to know the real Sherlock Holmes (and the real John Watson), we were simply confirmed bachelors who solved cases together and lived in the same flat: 221B Baker Street.

It had been days without a case, wherein which I found time to catch up on reading and trash telly.

For a while, Sherlock bemoaned his state of boredom. He flapped around like a limp fish on the couch and sighed dramatically until I turned up the volume to ignore the muffled obscenities he'd picked up at The Yard. He obsessively checked his cellular, but Lestrade, who refused to retire, had nothing to offer.

As the days stretched into a week, we settled into our natural rhythm. I took a few shifts at hospital and tried to make Sherlock eat. Always a battle. I stayed out late one night, consuming perhaps a pint too many with Stamford for old time's sake and came home to a silent flat.

"Sherlock?"

I wobbled a bit on my feet as I locked the front door behind me. Yes, definitely one pint too many.

"Sherlock? Are you home?"

I wondered if he'd been called onto a case. I was used to him running off without me, although I never liked it. Never.

I searched through a few cupboards for chips, thankful to find no fingers or heads. Some things never changed.

Of course I found nothing to eat. I considered a cup of tea, but as I moved to put the kettle on, I noticed Sherlock's bedroom door was open. The dim light on his bedside table threw shadows on the hall floor.

"Sherlock?"

I took a few heavy steps toward his door and, well, was shocked to find him … asleep? The door creaked as I looked inside, but he didn't move so I stood and watched. No matter how many times I'd caught him snoozing at the microscope or taking short blinks in the back of cabs, I still found it strangely miraculous to see the great Sherlock Holmes actually taking a proper rest.

His back was turned to me, but his still shaggy curls stuck up like thick ferns sprouted beneath the soil of a moonlit forest floor. One of his long-fingered hands clutched to the blanket that covered him. I saw one pointed edge of a pale cheekbone. Then, I backed away, tried to leave before he woke. He always woke when I watched him sleep, like he could feel me in his dreams.

Then he whimpered and I froze. He whimpered again, mouthed incoherent words. His fingers closed tightly to the blanket above him. He said, "No, stop, don't …"

Intellect does not dissuade nightmares.

I moved to the bed and put one hand on his shoulder. "Sherlock." I said his name again, louder. And again.

He sat up suddenly. "John."

"Sherlock. You all right, mate?"

"Of course." He pushed out of bed and past me. I listened to his bare feet patter into the bathroom. The door closed behind him.

When I reached down to touch his mattress, I found it soaked with sweat.

I returned to the kitchen. After over fifteen years of friendship, one learned not to ask questions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. But just as I put the kettle back on the stove, his voice poured over my shoulder.

"I need you to stay with me tonight," he said.

I turned to find him a foot away, his bright eyes darting, his hair wild. "What?" I asked.

"John. I am feeling the need to entertain very old habits that would greatly displease you. I need you to make sure I don't leave the house, at any cost."

"Jesus, Sherlock." I took the kettle off the stove, tea forgotten, its very existence erased from Earth's surface due to my flat mate's pronouncement.

"It gets too … My mind …" His eyes left my face and focused somewhere near the counter. He shook his head.

"You want me to stay up all night?" Even as I said the words, I doubted my own ability to do so. Yet, my familiar long-suffering emotion awoke: _protect Sherlock._

"Stay up all night? Of course not. I'll just handcuff myself to you."

"I'm … sorry?"

Next thing I knew, I was upstairs in my own bed with an escort. I lay under the covers, Sherlock above. The light was on at his side, and he read a book with no title: something ancient, worn, and undoubtedly scientific. My right hand was tethered by metal to his left.

If I hadn't been half-drunk, I never would have fallen asleep.

In the morning, something tickled my face. I moved to scratch my chin but found my right hand wedged beneath something heavy. I moved my left, but instead of being able to scratch my chin, my fingers curled into soft, thick curls. My chest felt comfortably crushed. A long leg twined around one of my own. I smelled Sherlock: spice and soap and … home.

No wonder because Sherlock used me as a lumpy human pillow.

Despite my over-warmth and his intimate proximity, I didn't speak. I sank back into slumber with the sound of his quiet breaths and the feel of his slow, steady heartbeat against mine.

As a matter of record, I would like to clear the air and tell you Sherlock Holmes was no virgin, as The Woman surmised. He told me once, years ago, of his many college rendezvous with men and women alike, all in the name (of course) of research.

We first met, he later told me, in the midst of his "dry years," so called. He was an addict, he said, of drugs, of puzzles, and of sex. He embraced the puzzles and left behind the rest, although there were nights when Sherlock did not come home until morning—and, when he did, he smelled of unfamiliar cologne and once even sported a love bite that took several days to fade. I never asked questions.

I was no pillar of virtue either. One thing I kept from Sherlock—and he had thankfully never asked—was my "number." Grateful was I since I didn't know it, although my list only included women, which was why, that morning, handcuffed to my dearest friend in a tangle of limbs, I should have felt some kind of discomfort.

I didn't. Discovering the real John Watson had begun.

The next morning, Sherlock woke and stretched like a cat. We had to wander downstairs to retrieve the handcuff key from top of the fridge, but once unhinged, Sherlock handed me the morning newspaper and made me a cup of coffee, black. He handed it to me in my chair and, strangely, pressed his lips to the top of my head before returning to his microscope in the kitchen.

Moments later, the phone rang: a case. At long last, a case.

It would be weeks before we hit another dry spell. The aging Lestrade was out sick for an entire week, and God knew Donovan would never stoop so low as to ask Sherlock's help. Even after all those years, she still dared not speak to him, perhaps out of guilt for once believing him a fraud, perhaps from pride.

I watched Sherlock carefully and waited for the wild look of an addict to return to his eyes. One night, it did.

His body was a small bean in the center of the couch. His dark blue dressing gown covered all but the top of his head and his bare feet, long toes. I watched TV but listened to the harried sound of his breath. Then, I pressed mute.

"Sherlock? You all right?"

"The voices," he said quietly. "The voices are getting louder."

"The … voices?" I stood.

He covered the top of his head with his hands. "So many victims. When it's quiet like this, so bloody hateful, I hear them." He paused. "The drugs, they used to … quiet things. Make me stop thinking for one moment, maybe two. That's why I did it, you know," he said to the couch. "That's why."

"It never occurred to me," I said, "to ask you why."

He flopped onto his back and stared at the ceiling. The muscle in the side of his jaw bounced.

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No." He closed his eyes, and I could see the storm, raging. I watched clouds rush in and cover him like a boat at sea. He left me, voyaged deep into his Mind Palace, but I knew there was no peace to be found there: only other voices, screams, ghosts.

I knelt beside him. I'd spent years watching his lips move, half a dozen guilty times wondering how his lips tasted. But that was before, when I was young and banished such thoughts behind locks of lunacy.

I was not young anymore. Neither was I lonely, because I had Sherlock. Kneeling beside him, my best friend, I could not fathom loneliness, so long had it been since I'd felt the emotion.

I hadn't been lonely since Mary, the miscarriage of my daughter, and the weeks spent waiting for Sherlock to wake from his coma, self-inflicted when he'd ended Moriarty for good by pulling him over the ledge of a murderous waterfall.

I was never lonely with Sherlock, never, so that night, I leaned over and kissed him to thank him, and there was nothing timid about that first kiss.

Of course he would be an oral expert as he was at everything else.

And I finally discovered: his lips tasted like tea, something black like Earl Grey.

He dragged my body from the floor and across his hips. He held on to my face and kissed with the unbridled savagery he usually reserved for the cross-examination room.

I'd never kissed a man before, but the feeling of his tongue against mine brought about no shame or hesitancy in me. Much the opposite as I barely remembered to breathe, so enamored was I with the way his lips moved and his hands—long fingers—under the edges of my shirt.

His years of research had paid off, as I would have allowed him access right then to any part of me, to all of me, if Sherlock hadn't forced my face away and told me to stop.

"Why?" I tried to lean down again. Just one more brutal kiss, _please, please_ …

He put his hand on my chest and held me away. So easy to forget the strength coiled in that lithe, graceful frame. "I don't want to rush into intimacy with the only person I've ever loved," he said.

I don't remember falling off the couch and knocking my head on the coffee table, but I must have, as the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the floor. Sherlock held a bag of ice to my head.

"Not good?" he asked.

I laughed, weakly, at our very old joke. "You love me?" I said.

"Of course. You're the only person I've ever known capable of bringing me peace."

I sat up, with his help. "Sherlock, you hate peace."

"Out there." He nodded toward the window. "It's not so bad in here." He pointed to his head. "I don't expect you to love me back, of course. I can be very unlovable, John, I know that. I would simply like you to live with me here at Baker Street until we're both too old to traverse the stairs."

"God, you're an idiot."

A wrinkle appeared across the bridge of his nose, which I reached out and touched until it went away.

"John—"

"I love you. I've always loved you. I just didn't know how."

"By protecting me," he said.

"Yes," I said. I leaned forward and wrapped my fingers in the hair at the base of his neck. I pulled him closer, and he leaned into me, curious but willing. I pressed our foreheads together. "Marry me."

Needless to say, for the duration of the night, my dear Sherlock was the one requiring the ice bag.

That was twenty years ago.

Now, as I sit and write, I prepare to end the blog of one Dr. John Watson.

You may have never liked my words, just like you never liked my husband. You thought him so cold, and he is now—his body, at least, awaiting burial in the morning.

I always knew he would go before me, his physicality tired from years of abuse and his mind exhausted, slowly going in the end. If his memory had gotten much worse, I would have killed him myself. Impossible to watch such a mind meander, alone, into darkness.

Still, he remembered me in the end. He remembered _us._

Sherlock Holmes was warm and soft. He liked to talk late into the night, cuddle late into the morning. He made me coffee without fail every day once we took our marriage vows. He held my hand at crime scenes. He even whispered my name in his sleep.

He shouted at you, yes. He made you feel like less, but consider his cruelty his armor. He didn't want you to know he felt every murder, heard every scream, stored in a dark recess of his Mind Palace—forever. He didn't want you to know how much he hurt. And loved.

Forgive him his hiding.

He doesn't need to hide anymore.

Even though Sherlock didn't believe in Heaven, I believe in a place where my beloved waits for me. I'll join him soon, I think. I wonder what we'll do together. Still hunt criminals? Leap over rooftops as we did in our youth?

I think not.

I think we'll drink coffee and make love. He'll look the way he did that first day at St. Bart's. I'll still have my shoulder scar, because Sherlock always liked it and would be irate to find it gone. I'll fall asleep to the sound of his voice, and finally, his great mind will find peace.

(Story image c/o br0-Harry at DeviantArt)


End file.
